There are several types of medical treatment, such as radiation therapy or radio frequency ablation that are known to benefit from an exact knowledge of the geometry of boundaries between different types of body tissue.
For instance, one of the most common forms of cardiac arrhythmias is atrial flutter (AFL). Radio frequency (RF) ablation has been shown as an effective treatment for patients with cardiac arrhythmia. Typical abnormal pathways of AFL include a re-entrant circuit around the tricuspid valve, crossing the cavotricuspid isthmus (CTI), which can be blocked by an ablation line created along the CTI. Since atrial wall thickness changes locally and is individual for each patient, the radio frequency ablation power used during clinical catheter ablation procedures has to be adjusted carefully to create transmural lesions, while avoiding wall perforation. Recently, it has been show that the outcome of isthmus ablation can be improved by taking anatomical characteristics such as wall thickness into consideration.
Further, magnetic resonance imaging is known to be able to provide information on anatomical characteristics such as wall thicknesses. In the paper by Koken, P. et al., “Atrial Thickness Mapping for EP Ablation using Black-Blood Restricted Field of View MRI”, Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 19 (2011), 3734, magnetic resonance-based atrial wall thickness imaging has been proposed for point-like measurements, employing a segmented 3D surface of the left atrium and a set of small, localized scans with high-resolution along the direction perpendicular to the atrial wall.